The Grimm Legend of Snow White

Paper Summary:

This paper looks at how the story of the legendary "Snow White" developed over the years. It discusses how there the most famous written version is that of the Brothers Grimm, but they did not create the story and instead only collected it along with other Germanic fairy tales of their time. It looks at other versions of the story and how these change or differ from each other. It ends with a discussion of movie versions of the story.

From the Paper:

"The stories collected by the Brothers Grimm constituted the first attempt to preserve in pure form the traditional domestic tales of the German people. The Grimms collected these stories chiefly from the mouths of the peasantry in Hanau and Hesse, with contributions from the other provinces of Germany as well as German Austria and Switzerland. The Grimms sought to avoid all additions, logical or artistic, and to retain as far as possible the actual language of the peasants while also eliminating all foreign and added elements as far as they could. This was in sharp contrast to an earlier collection by the Perraults from around 1700. They had converted several of the same folk tales into elaborate entertainments for the French court at Versailles and had made whatever emendations they wanted in doing so. In their original 1812 edition, the Grimms offered the stories in a style that was markedly terse and direct, with almost no description and few adjectives (other than "wicked," "good," "wise," and so on). The supernatural elements in these stories tend to be forces of nature (magic trees, animals, flowers, and winds). These were not children's "fairy stories," found in a middle-class 19th century genre. Instead, these were tales told largely to adults around the kitchen fire while they spun their wool and mended their tools, after their children had gone to bed. By 1850, such peasant family entertainment was dying out in the face of the Industrial Revolution, and the Grimms preserved the tradition ("Brothers Grimm: Tales for Children and Households")."

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